The Pleasant Valley School District, located in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, spans 120 square miles in northeastern Pennsylvania and serves approximately 5,500 students.

Given the district’s large coverage area, and its six distinct schools, leadership has historically struggled with collecting consistent data about its students, making it difficult to search and find data when it’s needed.

The real-time integration of Registration Gateway allows us to work with the student and the parent to coordinate a schedule at the same time that the student is registering.

— Christopher Fisher

“Registration was the responsibility of each building in the district,” said Robert Hines, associate principal of Pleasant Valley High School.

Collecting information the old-fashioned way – by asking parents to bring necessary documents and paperwork to a school’s site where each sheet of paper was copied for a student’s file and then saved in hard copy format – was cumbersome. And it held up the enrollment process.

It was a nightmare as far as paperwork, and once we had all the students’ paperwork in our hands, it had to be disseminated to the schools. It took a day to receive the paperwork and then another day to get it to the appropriate school.

— Robert Hines, associate principal of Pleasant Valley High School.

This, said Hines, delayed students in choosing their classes for the upcoming academic year.

Pleasant Valley School District needed a solution, but it had to integrate seamlessly with its existing student information system (SIS), Sungard’s eSchoolPLUS. After completing due diligence, leadership turned to SRC’s Registration Gateway.

“Now we have a district-wide registration process that happens in one office making information consistent,” said Hines. “Before, data wasn’t consistent and that made searching for a particular student difficult.”

“Our goal,” said Christopher Fisher, assistant to the superintendent for professional and support services for Pleasant Valley School District, “was to get students and parents into the building as fast as we could. The real-time integration of Registration Gateway allows us to work with the student and the parent to coordinate a schedule at the same time that the student is registering.”

In addition to tapping Registration Gateway, the district was the first to adopt SRC’s Human Resources Gateway solution, a configurable, web-based software application that simplifies and streamlines the onboarding process through the use of secure, digital storage and automated archival of all personnel data documentation.

Much like how Registration Gateway simplifies the student registration process, Human Resources Gateway improves efficiencies by eliminating of manual document tracking and provides a secure structure for the HR process. The application also integrates seamlessly with eSchoolPLUS making it an ideal solution for the district.

All new jobs are posted online and applicants are required to submit their information via the online Human Resources Gateway system.

“Pleasant Valley School District and their use of Registration Gateway and Human Resources Gateway is a perfect example of how a district can leverage the systems they currently use to handle multiple processes,” said Jennifer Peri, senior vice president, product management. “And the end result enables them to use their technology, training and financial resources in more efficient ways, streamline processes and achieve budgeting and time goals while ensuring data is secure and accurate.”

Next up

Now that Pleasant Valley School District has its student registration and new employee application/onboarding systems down to a science, leadership is looking to turn their focus to archiving existing paper records.

“We have 50 years of student records in boxes. That information needs to be digitized,” said Fisher. “And we also plan to digitize personnel records. It’s a big project for us, but the benefits will make it worth it.”

Fisher points to a recent example of when digitized records would have come in handy.

“We received a request from a graduate from 15 years ago,” he said. “He needed his transcript for a military job he was applying for. We had to search for his information by hand. Once these records are digitized, we can instead search by student ID or last name, making the search much more efficient and accurate.”

About SRC Solutions, Inc.:

Founded in 2001, the Pennsylvania company is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), which simplifies and automates cumbersome, repetitive and counter-productive work practices replacing them with easy-to-use, innovative electronic processes. SRC Solutions flagship Gateway Suite incorporates solutions to manage online registration, validate and clean data, as well as improve Student Relationship Management in the K12 market.

If we truly want educational technology to take root in schools and finally live up to the promise we've been expecting for more than a decade, schools need to develop a cadre of well-trained tech instructional coaches.

A massive international analysis finds more screen time is associated with a lower sense of well-being among teenagers, but the effects are too small to require policy changes, according to a study in the journal Nature Human Behavior.